activism – brooklyn spaces

mas house

oriana on 16 May ’15

[I’m counting down to the release of the Brooklyn Spaces book by doing one mini-post per day, sharing teasers of some of the places you’ll find in it.]

neighborhood: bed-stuy | space type: communal living | active: 2009–2015 | links: n/a

“We’re trying to make this a better city, a more livable city, together,” says Rebekah S., one of a dozen anarchist-focused denizens of MAs House, a close-knit community that supported a range of radical ideals like mutual aid, anti-authoritarianism, environmental and social justice, freeganism, and gender and sexual parity. Residents were very involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mayday actions, and the People’s Climate March. Environmental-justice and anticapitalism activists working on projects like Bushwick City Farm, Time’s Up, the 123 Community Center, and the Brooklyn Free Store have lived there. Residents have distributed leftist magazines on cargo bikes, conducted anarchist study groups and prisoner letter-writing campaigns, and provided jail support for arrested protestors. They also hosted art shows, film screenings, and concerts, often to support progressive causes.

pix by Kit Crenshaw

“You can feed a lot more people with a lot less money, time, and energy if you make one big pot of food together, rather than a bunch of individual meals,” says Laurel L., who started the space. “The whole really is stronger than the sum of its parts, and it’s very inspiring to be one of those parts.”

Unfortunately, due to increasingly aggressive tactics by the landlord, the MAs denizens were evicted in early 2015, scattering to several other activist, anarchist, and communally focused living spaces across Brooklyn—although they are still fighting for the right to reclaim their home.

Want to learn more about MAs House, and 49 other incredible Brooklyn Spaces? Buy the book!

time’s up

oriana on 10 Mar ’13

neighborhood: williamsburg | space type: community space, skillshare, activism | active since: 1987 | links: website, wikipedia, facebook, twitter, flickr

Environmental-activism nonprofit Time’s Up is actually one of the very first spaces I profiled when I started this project. (Read the original post here!) But that was two whole years ago, and more importantly, I just got a new (used) bike of my own from these guys, so I wanted to remind everybody how wonderful they are. They’ve also got all sorts of new initiatives and fun things in the works, so it seemed like a great time to revisit.

open workshop, pic by Eilon Paz

Time’s Up is a volunteer-run direct-action environmental group. Their most visible project is the bike co-op, which does three main things: 1) acquires, refurbishes, and sets people up with terrific, city-friendly used bikes (like mine!) for a donation of about $200; 2) leads bike repair workshops, teaching you how to fix all the different parts of your bike, including one class per week that’s for women and trans only; and 3) opens their doors three nights a week to anyone who wants to use their vast array of tools and talk to their incredibly knowledgeable mechanics while working on your own bike. (Check their calendar for dates and times.) They also hold lots of group bike rides and work on campaigns to support causes like anti-fracking, alternative energy, and safer streets, and they’re working to turn the space into a community gathering spot, with new plans like a bi-weekly movie night.

Read on for my Q&A with Keegan, one of the bottom-liners of the bike co-op and the guy who sold me my fabulous new bike!

Keegan fixing a bike, pic by me

brooklyn spaces: How would you define the Time’s Up mission?
Keegan: At heart we’re an environmental group, and because we’re in New York City, that means trying to find sustainable ways to live in an urban environment. Bike activism is a big part of it, because bicycling is sustainable transportation, and we want to make it so that everyone feels comfortable biking in the city. That means creating safe spaces, like bike lanes, but there’s always going to be a place where the bike lane ends, so we really need the streets to be safer in general. The NYPD needs to be ticketing motorists, and when cyclists and pedestrians are killed, they need to be doing proper investigations. We’re having a ride to advocate for this on March 21—everyone should come join us!

soooo many bikes! pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Where do you get the bikes you refurbish?
Keegan: We buy them in bulk, these Dutch-style Japanese bikes called mamacharis, which means “mother chariot.” They’re terrific city-friendly bikes. They’re upright, with full fenders so you can ride them in any weather, and really good brakes so they’re safe. Basically everybody rides mamacharis in Japan, they’re hugely popular. The government actually tried to ban them, because they thought it was too dangerous for women to be riding with a child on the front and a child on the back and all the groceries too. But the women of Japan rose up to defend their bicycles, and they won, the mamachari didn’t get banned.

shipment of used bikes, pix by Steve McMaster

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the group rides you guys do.
Keegan: We have a monthly moonlight ride through Central Park and another in Prospect Park, there’s a Peace Ride that goes through various peace sites in Lower Manhattan, and we have some goofy theatrical rides, which are also direct actions, like we dress up as clowns and call ourselves the Bike Lane Liberation Front. We crash into the back of cars, like “Oh hey, what are you doing in this bike lane?” and give out fake tickets, stuff like that.

group ride, pic by Rich Johnson

brooklyn spaces: Are you guys part of Critical Mass?
Keegan: Critical Mass is leaderless and worldwide, but we used to help facilitate it in New York a lot, often just by showing up. Sadly, that ride has gotten smaller and smaller due to a massive police crackdown. It’s the same reason they shut down Occupy Wall Street: they don’t want to look like they’re allowing a political demonstration. This last month there were four riders and fourteen police vehicles! So now we do First Friday rides instead—those get forty or fifty people and zero police.

fixin’ bikes, pic by Eilon Paz

brooklyn spaces: How many people are involved in Time’s Up?
Keegan: Our volunteer base is pretty huge, we have about fifteen hundred people. It’s a big, amorphous, fun group. It’s also very much a community.

brooklyn spaces: Do people come here and say “I have a wacky bike idea, can you help?”
Keegan: Oh yeah, ever since Occupy Wall Street, when we built energy-generating bikes to offset the gas generators in Zucotti Park.

energy bikes in Zucotti Park, pic by David Shankbone

brooklyn spaces: You guys used those after Sandy too, right?
Keegan: Yeah, although the bikes that were in Zuccotti were taken by the NYPD and mostly broken. We had three up and running when Sandy hit, and we deployed them right away, on the Lower East Side. When the LES got power back we took them to the Rockaways. We were also doing group rides out there three times a week, delivering goods. Through Occupy Sandy, we got funding to build fifteen more energy bikes, and some of them are still in the Rockaways. The People’s Free Medical Clinic is using two of them instead of getting hooked back up to the grid.

energy bike in the LES, post-Sandy, pic by Margot Julia DiGregorio

brooklyn spaces: How did Time’s Up end up in Williamsburg?
Keegan: We used to be at 49 East Houston St., and we got kicked out of there when the owner sold it to a developer. We were scrounging around for space and we did a direct action in Williamsburg when the Bedford Ave bike lane was taken out, a mock funeral for the lane. We got quite a bit of press for that, and the landlord here, Baruch Herzfeld, who’s a pretty dramatic and funny bike advocate himself, really liked what we were doing. This space was actually previously a bike shop, and he let us move in and take it over.

bike forks, pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel that being in Williamsburg has had an affect on the space, the mission, the way it’s run, that sort of thing?
Keegan: Definitely. Being here dictated so much of what we did for the first couple of years, because we’re right on the borderline between Chasidic Williamsburg and hipster Williamsburg. When we opened the co-op, we had a shocking number of Chasidic people coming in to fix their bikes, both men and women. It’s really interesting to see them come here and work alongside a bunch of hipsters who obviously have very different values, and then they find out that they’re really not so different: they all want to work on their bikes, they all want to live cheaply and sustainably.

tools! pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a nice fond memory you have from your time here.
Keegan: It’s all pretty good. After every single workshop I’m like, “Wow, that was great!” I just helped this guy fix his bike who does the programming for the tiny theatre down the block, Spectacle. I also got to help a woman who had been hit by a car. It’s just so much great community building; we all become friends by the end of the night. Every workshop is a terrific experience.

***

Like this? Read more about community spaces: No-Space, Trees Not Trash, Bushwick City Farms, Brooklyn Free Store, The Illuminator, Occupy Wall Street art show, Books Through Bars

no-space

oriana on 14 Jan ’13

space type: activism | neighborhood: greenpoint | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter

No-Space is the current workshop for Not An Alternative, an art-and-activism collective that works to affect politics and culture through organizing, education, and partnering with community groups. The group is led by Beka, a progressive-nonprofit strategist, and Jason, an artist and video-production specialist. Not An Alternative’s old home, Change You Want to See Gallery, was an activism hub in Williamsburg in the mid 2000s, where the group hosted film screenings, lectures, workshops, and production meetings, as well as a rotating cast of collaborators, including the Yes Men, Reverend Billy, and members of the Barcelona activist collective Yomango.

all photos from Not An Alternative

The new space, in industrial Greenpoint, has coworking desks in the back and a production facility in the front. The group and the space have been very active in Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, and many other Occupy and activist permutations. A large part of NAA’s disaster-relief contribution has been designing and producing visual symbols for the movement, such as vests, magnets, patches, and “way-finding” signs, to clarify and make physical the incredible work that Occupy Sandy has been doing since the superstorm hit. This work has been done in conjunction with Occupy Town Square, Pratt’s Disaster Resilience Network, and the Wise City.

Not An Alternative is always seeking coconspirators and collaborators, so get in touch to join in with their work. But first check out my interview with Jason!

Jason

brooklyn spaces: How did Not An Alternative come about?
Jason: It was created in the lead-up to the Republican National Convention in 2004. People had realized that reenacting tactics they’d seen in the sixties wasn’t going to work, so we had to think of different ways to affect transformation. Our space became an organizing and production hub. Every week we would hold a production meeting for a different group, and we would connect them with curators or people with space or materials, and just sort of help the whole thing get under way. After the convention and the election, we realized that we’d created an important thing. We were trying to decide how to continue it, and the next thing we realized, our neighborhood was under this massive rezoning. So we jumped into that, because it was really all the same thing. This is politics, this is globalization on a local level.

Change You Want To See Gallery

brooklyn spaces: So it evolved into a general gathering spot and workspace for creative activism, which became the Change You Want to See Gallery.
Jason: Yeah. We started hosting events around the same things, activism and technology theory. So it was brainstorming, theory, discussion, presentations, and workshops, and then production—taking all those ideas and putting them into practice with community groups, social movements, different campaigns.

brooklyn spaces: Are there community groups or campaigns that were particularly inspiring to you, or that you felt really worked?
Jason: We did some work with Picture the Homeless that I think was really good, after the crisis of 2008. We partnered with them on an action where they put up a tent city in a vacant lot. We pretended to be a film crew: we drove in with forty people, set up one of those white tents with tables and bagels, and shot a fake music video while our “stagehands” were in the back cutting down the fence and setting up the tent city. By the time the police came, the whole thing was erected. It got great media attention, we even had a story in the New York Times. There was a lot of pressure on Bloomberg at that moment, because he had just announced the results of a five-year plan to end homelessness, which had ended in an abject failure.

brooklyn spaces: What were some great presentations or workshops?
Jason: There were so many. Reverend Billy did the closing of the space, which was great. We had a great series called “Symbols, Branding and Persuasion,” where we had designers, activists, and people involved in branding talk about their practices. We had a friend of Beka’s who basically led the design team for Obama, we had someone who ran focus groups, we had the creative director of Interbrand, which is the largest branding company in the world. Activists are largely very alienated by advertising, it kind of suggests manipulation, but we tried to break those things apart.

brooklyn spaces: And Change You Want to See Gallery ended right before Occupy Wall Street, right?
Jason: Yeah, just a month before. By the time we left we no longer made any sense in Williamsburg anymore. We were across the street from the Knitting Factory, the Commodore, down the block from all those new restaurants; the whole scene was just completely different. We used to be outside on the sidewalk with table saws, and all the neighbors would send their kids over to learn how to make stuff. By the end we had people knocking on the door all the time going, “What kind of store are you?” So we got the new space in September, and then OWS happened, which thoroughly consumed us for a year. We even took over a second space downstairs that we used for production for awhile.

brooklyn spaces: Let’s talk about the work you guys have been doing with Occupy Sandy.
Jason: Our work with Sandy is a continuation of the work we were doing with OWS. We saw Occupy as being fundamentally about the contestation of space, and we tried to focus that idea so it was clear to people. If you can articulate something, you can understand it. And if you can see it, if it has a material form, it can be reproduced. Zuccotti Park had a material form and was able to be reproduced in other cities. So for Sandy, we made construction vests that say “Occupy Sandy” on them, and we also made way-finding signs, which direct people to distribution centers where they can get medicine, lawyers, food, shelter, tools, information, or anything else. And then we went out and put up all the signs as if we had the authority to do so, right in front of the police and the National Guard. They let it happen because they know there’s a need for it, so it turns out that we do have the authority. This stuff is functional in terms of helping people find a location or a person who can help them, but it also affects the symbolic landscape in terms of making the Occupy network more visible. It transforms the relationship to power around the symbol, and around a certain kind of visual language code.

brooklyn spaces: And it certainly has echoes of branding, and of making sure there’s a public acknowledgment of who’s doing this. People outside of New York don’t realize how much of the relief work has been done by Occupy Sandy.
Jason: Although we do so much work with advertising, we’ve made a conscious decision not to describe what we do as branding. I rather think that we’re occupying the vocabulary of the public, the symbolic language that discusses public use of space. We’re not introducing a new “brand”; we’re inhabiting an existing vocabulary. That’s the way we talk about it.

brooklyn spaces: Got it. So having experienced the transformation of Williamsburg, and now the industrial edge of Greenpoint, do you feel that has had any effect on the way you organize or the way you run your space?
Jason: For sure. When we worked on the Williamsburg rezoning, our focus was on organizing the hipster community, because they were the least organized, due to all the things that make hipsters hipsters. The fact that they can’t self-identify as hipsters makes them unaware as a class, so unlike the Dominican or Latino communities who are like, “This is what we are, you can tell because we all have this tattoo,” the hipsters are like, “I have this tattoo and that means that I’m not part of any community.” But the neighborhoods we’ve been working with are also very creative, and we try to see how far we can push them toward becoming a creative political class.

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future?
Jason: We would like to destabilize authority to the point that it becomes a question as to what was done by activists and what was done by a “legitimate” or existing authority. And I think that can actually happen. Our politics are about shifting culture, or shifting politics through transforming culture. I feel like this space is serving a very important role to social movements and community groups in terms of what we provide and what we’re modeling, ways of engaging in politics. So I would like to see it continue to grow.

***

Like this? Read about more activist spaces: The Illuminator, OWS art show, Bushwick City Farm, Books Through Bars, Time’s Up, Trees Not Trash, Brooklyn Free Store

the illuminator

oriana on 18 Sep ’12

space type: maker, activism | neighborhood: ft. greene & all over | active since: 2012 | links: website, facebook, twitter

For many involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, the two-month anniversary last November was a galvanizing moment. As tens of thousands of activists marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, light projections suddenly appeared on the Verizon building nearby: things like “99%” “MIC CHECK” “#occupy,” and more. I was on that march and it was absolutely electrifying to see. We screamed and clapped and chanted, and the people driving by beneath us honked and cheered out their windows. It was an incredible moment.

image from Boing Boing

In the wake of that action, Mark Read, the one who pulled it off, decided that had been just the beginning. He talked it over with Ben Cohen, a longtime friend of the movement, who eventually agreed to fund the construction of a customized vehicle for mobile guerilla projections. The guy tapped to construct the unit was Chris Hackett—one of the rulers of the Brooklyn maker scene, and cofounder of the art combine Madagascar Institute. Unsurprisingly, Hackett built a formidable machine, and the Illuminator was born.

Mark put out the call and amassed a merry band of activists to bottom-line the project. The Illuminator has been a smashing success, riding through protests from OWS actions to Occupy Town Square performances, partnering with community groups like rent-strikers in Sunset Park and workers’ rights activists in Midtown, projecting slogans and pictures onto the Russian Consulate, the British Embassy, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Williamsburg Bridge, and on and on.

The Illuminator is at a crucial stage in their journey right now, because they’re about to lose their funding. So this is the last week of their Kickstarter campaign, which, if successful, will allow them not only to keep this van, but to build more for use around the country. You should absolutely donate to their fund, but first read my interview with some of the activists involved.

clockwise from top left: Lucky, Talia, Annabelle, Grayson, Mark, Dan

brooklyn spaces: What was the first outing and the first projection?
Mark: The debut was March 3rd, for Low Lives, a virtual online performance-art project. We went all over that night: Zuccotti Park, the Whitney Museum where we projected the cheap art manifesto from the Bread and Puppet Theatre, down to Cooper Union, and then to Chase Bank.

brooklyn spaces: Do you plan the art before each action? Do you make it yourselves? Where does it come from?
Lucky: We produce a lot ourselves, but the great thing about this is it really is a Occupy resource, and more than that, it’s an activist resource. We reach out to lots of groups around the city, like the Sunset Park rent-strikers and the Hot & Crusty workers, and the messaging always comes from the people we’re supporting.

brooklyn spaces: How do you decide what projects the Illuminator will get involved with?
Annabelle: Well, it started with the 99%, and anything that could fit into that. We did that first projection two days after the eviction from the park.
Talia: I think it has to come from a positive space, people have to be happy about it. There has to be that exciting kind of antagonism.
Lucky: I think this goes back to the collective way we’re run. When we want to do something, there’s automatically a dialogue. We all come from very disparate backgrounds—I’m a biologist, Annabelle is a union researcher, and Mark does media, just to name a few—which really enriches the project, because we bring so many different perspectives.

image by jenna pope photography

Mark: Here’s a funny example of something we wouldn’t do. We were contacted by Woody Harrelson, and he wanted us to do some marketing for his upcoming Off-Broadway play, Bullet for Adolph. We’ve done work for hire before; we do have to keep the van in gas and parking. But what he wanted us to project was “Adolph is coming.” He was willing to pay us ten thousand dollars, which of course we could have really used, but we just couldn’t do it, it was too awful.

photo by athena soules

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the site-specific projections.
Lucky: When we do site-specific stuff, it’s more to do with the people who are rallying around the cause, or the cause itself. The van sort of becomes the hero, popping up and supporting causes, so when students go on an education strike, or renters go on rent strike, we’re part of those actions. There was the action with Occupy Tape, which was an action against Spectra, and we did a “Free Pussy Riot” projection on the Russian Consulate.

Mark: I think the first site-specific one was at Atlantic Yards. There was a mic check, a call-and-response thing about what had happened with the Barclays Center, and a piece that was produced by our community partner in that case, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. The police were all over us that night and we sort of had to outwit them, which has been the case several times since. It was like a cat-and-mouse game.

brooklyn spaces: So the cops are not too fond of the Illuminator.
Dan: Like with the rest of Occupy, there’s a pattern of repression. The police want to disrupt people coming together, and the Illuminator rallies people and gets them excited, so we’re the last thing they want. Often they shut us down by making things up. I got a summons for disorderly conduct that we went to court for, and they didn’t even prosecute it because they knew it was bullshit. Another time they came out with a ticket already written and then asked “How is this projector mounted?” I said, “It’s bolted to this steel bar which is welded to the frame of the vehicle.” And they were like, “Um, this is a danger to pedestrians. It might fall off.”
Lucky: It’s about claiming contested space. In Zuccotti we were occupying a physical park, but the Illuminator is after the advertising space, the commercialized space above our heads and in our eye-line. So it’s predictable that that same sort of repression would happen, because we’re doing something powerful by subverting the order of things, the way society is constructed in a corporatized way.

brooklyn spaces: What’s been the most meaningful part of this project for you all?
Mark: For me, getting away with things is pleasurable, and getting people excited in an action context is awesome. There’s also the pleasure of talking to strangers, having conversations about the state of affairs in this country and the world, the kinds of crises we’re facing, what it’s going to take to solve those problems. Once these young kids came up to us, totally excited, and said, “Are you guys with the revolution?” I was like, “I hope so!”
Lucky: One of my favorite moments was Independence Hall in Philly, because that was totally spontaneous, and it often feels better when you don’t overwork yourself with planning and details. We were driving down to D.C. and saw Independence Hall to our left and figured, “Why not?” and went and projected “99%” onto the building. And as it happened, there were a bunch of Occupiers right there who took pictures and tweeted it all over. This is sort of a media machine, and a critique of mainstream media is that it privileges special interests in voice. Occupy has done a lot to use the power of modern technology to amplify important stories, and the Illuminator does that really well.

Talia: For me the best is feeling like a part of this well-oiled activism machine, and in Philly it really gelled for me how powerful this is, doing that projection and then seeing our image bouncing all around the internet afterward.
Dan: It’s the most re-tweeted thing we’ve ever done, I think. But for me it’s also about the one-on-one stuff. One of my favorite Occupy chants is “Occupy will never die / Evict us, we multiply.” This is like a manifestation of that, because we can spread all over the city and even the country in a totally different way.
Talia: And since the Illuminator 1.0 is going to be shut down, the idea of multiplying, of 2.0, is awesome. One van is great, but it’s limiting. A broader, more mobile fleet all around the nation? That’s really exciting. There’s this brand new energy fueled by all our ideas for what we’ll do next.

***

Like this? Read about more activism: #OWS art show, No-Space, Time’s Up, Brooklyn Free Store, Books Through Bars, Bushwick City Farms, Trees Not Trash

#occupywallstreet art show

oriana on 22 Oct ’11

space type: art gallery | neighborhood: wall street | active: october 2011 | links: website

Over the course of doing this site, I’ve gotten away with profiling a few spaces in Ridgewood, since they were only a block or two from Brooklyn. Obviously no such gloss of proximity is possible for Wall Street, but as I’ve watched and participated in the #OWS movement over the past month, I’ve been struck by how it represents so many of the things I love about Brooklyn creative culture, like the familial bonds of those working in close proximity, the willingness to struggle together in the face of bad odds, the tendency toward horizontalism and consensus-based decision-making, the starry-eyed idealism born of the desire to make the world more beautiful, more exciting, more fair. If that’s not enough, the “No Comment” art show put on by #OWS in the old JP Morgan building on Wall Street was by far the Brooklyn-est thing I’ve ever seen in lower Manhattan.

The massive show, which featured art made at and inspired by Occupy Wall Street, was put on in collaboration with Loft in the Red Zone and had all kinds of work, from painting and photography to quilting, from illustrated protest signs to a spray-painted tent, from video installations to a gigantic flag made of actual dollar bills. There were spontaneous performance-art pieces throughout the night, there were bands, there was even on-site screenprinting. There was also, of course, an intense police presence out front, and to get to the show you had to wind through an endless maze of barricaded streets and blocked-off intersections, but the show itself was sprawling, joyous, challenging, beautiful—just like Occupy Wall Street. Just like Brooklyn.

I don’t have an interview in this post, but I do have lots and lots of pictures (sorry for my shitty camera, as always). Interspersed with the photos I’ve shared links to some of the most moving or fascinating or spot-on articles my friends and I have found about the OWS movement. Enjoy—and then get out there and occupy something.

By the way: If anyone knows the names of the artists whose work I’ve posted pictures of, please get in touch so I can give credit! brooklynspacesproject [at] gmail [dot] com.

Douglas Rushkoff’s “Think Occupy Wall Street is a phase? You don’t get it.” on CNN

Keith Boykin’s “Everything the Media Told You About Occupy Wall Street Is Wrong” on Huffington Post

“Why We Support #OccupyWallStreet” by Move On, includes an incredibly galvanizing video.

“Bushwick DIY Takes Wall Street” on BushwickBK (featuring Ray from Bushwick Print Lab!)

Max Udargo’s “Open Letter to that 53% Guy” on Daily Kos

Danny Schechter’s “Why Are So Many in the Media Threatened by Occupy Wall Street?” on Disinformation

“Man Uses Occupy Wall Street’s People’s Mic to Propose to Girlfriend” on The Observer

Joshua Holland’s “The Stunning Victory that Occupy Wall Street Has Already Achieved” on AlterNet

“Protesters Against Wall Street” on New York Times

Matt Taibbibi’s “Wall Street Isn’t Winning—It’s Cheating” on Rolling Stone

imgur’s “What OWS is about and data behind the movement”

favorite feeds from my anarchist sister: OWS official site, Occupy Together, Occupy NYC livestream, Global Revolution livestream

written by my friend Jillian for Guernica: “In Defense of Youth”

recommended by Beka, who runs Not An Alternative: J.A. Myerson’s “Some Unsolicited Advice to the Democratic Party: Cave to the Occupy Wall Street Movement” on truthout

recommended by Megan, lawyer & activist: Justin Elliott’s “Process is politics at Occupy Wall Street” on Salon

recommended by Erica, activist & writer at Free Williamsburg: Josh Harkinson’s “What the NYPD Really Thinks of Occupy Wall Street” on Mother Jones

recommended by Jeanice: David Graeber’s “On Playing By the Rules – The Strange Success of @OccupyWallStreet” on Naked Capitalism

recommended by Miss Scorpio of Gemini & Scorpio: Henry Blodget’s “Here’s What the Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About” on Business Insider

Sally Kohn’s “What will victory look like for Occupy Wall Street?” on CNN

“Here Are Occupy Wall Street’s Plans for a National Convention that Could Change the Face of America” on Business Insider

***

Like this? Read about more activism: The Illuminator, Time’s Up, The Brooklyn Free Store, Books Through Bars, No-Space, Trees Not Trash, Bushwick City Farms

books through bars

oriana on 19 Mar ’11

neighborhood: red hook | space type: nonprofit | active since: 1996 | links: website, facebook

Books Through Bars is a all-volunteer collective started by the Nightcrawlers Anarchist Black Cross, and the group’s single goal is to donate free books to the incarcerated. Prisoners write in with requests, and three nights a week, during packing sessions, volunteers scour the bulging shelves of donated books to fill those requests. The group attracts a diverse variety of volunteers—from hipsters to activists to teachers—all of whom are united under the belief that literacy and access to reading material is a human right. Currently housed in the basement of Freebird Books, BTB has been in several previous donated spaces, including a NYCANH building and ABC No Rio before that. Their only cost is postage, and they hold lots of events, like movie screenings, game nights, and music and art shows, to raise funds to cover that expense.

Last summer I volunteered at BTB about once a week. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience, with a consistent, tangible feeling of accomplishment every time you find a book that you know is just what a particular person is looking for. So go help out this terrific organization! Donate some books, volunteer at a packing session, or have fun at an event. But first, check out my interview with collective members Joe and Danny.

brooklyn spaces: How do the prisoners find out about the organization?
Joe: Word of mouth spreads really easily. People in prison are kind of starved for companionship, you know?

brooklyn spaces: Do you get a lot of strange letters?
Danny: Some of the strangest are not from prisoners but from prison officials. We recently had Freud for Beginners rejected by the state of California because it “depicts nudity in such a way as to create the appearance that sexual conduct is imminent.”

brooklyn spaces: Do you get a lot of return letters from the prisoners? Do people write back to say thanks for the books?
Joe: Yeah, we get thank you letters all the time. I often write letters to people that I slip into the books. There was someone I wrote to—I’m a Satanist, and so is he, and I sent him all these Satanic books. And as a thank you, he sent me an ink imprint of his hand with the Sigil of Baphomet on it, and it had flecks of his blood, saliva, and semen. It’s framed and hanging on my wall.
Danny: I have one of his drawings on my wall too.
Joe: Another guy I developed a correspondence with, I ended up calling the prison for him to get him medical treatment he’s been denied, and I’ve even spoken to his mother. He got out recently, and he called to thank me for everything I did. I think it’s really unfortunate for the incarcerated when the human element gets lost.

brooklyn spaces: What are the most common types of books requested?
Danny: A lot of African American history, Spanish dictionaries, educational stuff, like math and science.

brooklyn spaces: I remember one letter asking for books on fixing cars, and I thought that was so heartbreaking. I’m sure the prisoners probably have no access to cars.
Joe: The ones that make me cry are the ones that are barely legible, where you can tell this person has a child’s reading level, and it’ll be like, “Please send books on dinosaurs.” Like putting this person in a cage is doing the world so much fucking good, right? These folks have no access to real literature. I do a debate program in Rikers with the youth, which was started by a Books Through Bars member, and I’ve seen the libraries there. There’s basically shitty pulp and the bible, and that’s it. And this is New York, I can only imagine how bad it is elsewhere.

brooklyn spaces: I know BTB wasn’t always in Brooklyn, but do you think Brooklyn has influenced the space in any way? Do you feel like being in Brooklyn is a good fit?
Danny: It wasn’t Brooklyn for the sake of Brooklyn. After we left the NYCAH space, we had two options, and both happened to be in Brooklyn.
Joe: There’s a lot of gentrifying scum and hipsters around Brooklyn, and I guess that’s why it’s good to have this here, because the wealthy and liberal-leaning youth are all about Brooklyn. As someone who’s from Brooklyn—one of the last people from Brooklyn who’s in Brooklyn—it makes me a little angry, but hopefully if this article gets out and people read it, the privileged scum who see fit to displace the members of my community might come down to volunteer, or, better yet, give us some of their parents’ fucking money.

***

Like this? Read about more activism: #OccupyWallStreet art show, Bushwick City Farms, The Illuminator, Brooklyn Free Store, Trees Not Trash, Time’s Up